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Thoughtful about the click culture

Stare Into The Lights My Pretties
Regissør: Jordan Brown
(USA)

Stare Into The Lights My Pretties explores how people are affected by the all-consuming need to be up-to-date and online. 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Obviously, we are living in a time of radical change in cultural behavior and a growing "body, click and play" culture. This documentary asks what the intellectual, cerebral and neurological consequences of such a culture will be.

New world order. Brown delivers a heartfelt documentary about the "wonderful new world" that awaits us. The film opens by reminding us of the enormous difference between knowledge and information. Knowledge means being able to contextualize and interpret pieces of information, develop ideas and concepts, and connect the collected facts and relate these to a current situational context. These basic capabilities are now rapidly weakening and are being replaced by scarce pieces of information on the Internet – a flat, horizontal line of communication that lacks depth and thoroughness. Teachers are becoming increasingly concerned that certain brain functions will stop developing. The ability to analyze facts is no longer required or learned.

Access to "facts" is becoming more and more limited and at the same time devoting more attention to the Internet. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other services offer ever more "targeted information" that is filtered to fit users' personal interests. The result is a communication bubble that leads to closed mindsets, and users have no idea what the web is hiding from them. Within the "display culture", companies through technology convergence have not only increased their power and influence, but also designed a central mechanism for social control. They set out to offer freedom and democracy through an "open source", but have in effect created a perfect, giant echo chamber. What you get is not alternative, but affirmative arguments. Statistics show that 85 percent of adults in the United States receive their news from social media, 64 percent from just one source.

Goodbye privacy. Today, internet users are monitored systematically. Each click – including those related to private health and sexual relationships – is stored and creates a database of potential wrongdoings and accusations through political and religious profiling, which can be retrieved and used to criminalize the user under changing cultural and political conditions. In the bubble of selected information, human behavior is reshaped and new practices for time spent are established, which keep people engaged and online for specific purposes while observing their consumption patterns.

The new dominance strategy is no longer to punish, but to create addiction. The Gambler Syndrome is one of the most obvious. Examples of Skinner's behaviorism theory can be seen everywhere. Unpredictability is essential to reinforce gaming interest; the floating "corpse culture" gives surprises all the time. The Internet has evolved into a domestic gaming machine. "Tasting" has become a biological instinct – it's the first thing to do in the morning, it fills every break, and it's a permanent invasion of the mind. Technology philosopher Lewis Mumford sums it up like this: "People are happy to be dominated and believe they are in heaven."

Gamification and nano-monitoring are the two main strategies in the microclick culture, which measure values ​​in clicks. Former Facebook boss Sean Parker has stated that the goal was to manipulate the thought process with applications – with a social reward feedback looping – to incessantly seize the user's time: "We were this conscious and we did it anyway."

Brown uses many different perspectives to decrypt the cultural changes that are going on: technicians, political scientists, web engineers, philosophers and psychologists.

We become technology. Brown uses many different perspectives to decipher the cultural changes that are going on: technicians, political scientists and social science experts, web engineers, philosophers and psychologists. Cultural changes also include what happens on the most personal level. We can see how self-presentation on the Internet has changed from quirky, personalized websites in the 90s through form-driven but weird portraits on Myspace pages, to formatted and market-friendly Facebook pages – from a short, personal and open expression to a Completely market and computer friendly compliant page.

The screen culture is not only addictive, but largely compulsive addiction. It is a serious health problem that is only now beginning to be taken seriously. It may already be too late for the next generation to avoid falling into imitation patterns. Neuroscientists like Nicholas Carr, Richard Watson and Sherry Turtle have confirmed in a number of publications that the human brain will adapt to click-information perception.

The documentary ends with a rather cynical utopia that shows Katina Michael at a TEDx conference in 2012, in which she states: "Soon we will not talk about the social implications of technology, but how society has become technology" – that is, how the computers in a not too the distant future will take over our bodies. The echo chamber effect is a first step in that direction: If the information given to us is selective and only reinforces pre-existing beliefs, we will never be challenged to think differently. It can also lead you to the illusory conclusion that humans and what they have created are the only reality that exists.

Perceptions that are not questioned – such as the myth of a comprehensive technology as a universal force – are the real factors that dominate society. For the elite sectors – the military, the bureaucracy and powerful companies – the assumption that technology cannot be stopped leads to a rather useful sense of powerless hypocrisy that "technology" is the consequence and origin of their worldview, needs and interests, as Lelia Green, researcher and author of techno Culture, underlines. Only by breaking this myth will resistance still be possible. Otherwise, technology will take over the world by giving the machines power to dominate.

The technology depends on how we use it. The technology is not neutral and can only be used within its design framework, based on the designers' knowledge and the society in which they are socialized.

Invites to discussion. In his first documentary, Brown delivers a strong and straightforward study, full of statements from a remarkable panorama of speakers and witnesses. The pictures illustrate the speakers' theories and are drawn from documentation of events, technological scenarios and archival material.

The film is a key document as a starting point for discussions about today's society and allows for extreme thought and radical criticism (qualities that are lost in the click culture), which are sometimes polemical but never useless.

The movie can be viewed for free here: https://stareintothelightsmypretties.jore.cc 

Dieter Wieczorek
Dieter Wieczorek
Wieczorek is a critic living in Paris.

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